True, but it should be understood that it was not actually ~illegal~ to own or play a 'refused classification' game previously in Australia in most States (WA being the notable exception). It was merely illegal for a store to SELL the game. Or more accurately, the law says that all media sold to the public in Australia must have a classification, so obviously if something doesn't have one/is refused classification, they can't sell it. And due to some stupidness arising from the early 90s when the classification scheme for computer games was first developed, the ratings only topped out at MA15+ (whereas they go up to R or X for other media). After all, only kids play these new-fangled computer game things right?
I live in Australia, but own and play, perfectly legally, several games that are were refused classification in Australia. I bought these in person while travelling overseas in the past, or ordered them from an overseas website. And in my jurisdiction at least (the ACT) I'm not doing anything wrong. The only thing I couldn't do is set up a retail company and sell them.
Getting a proper R18+ rating for games is the culmination of a pretty long fight by gamers and retailers. Assuming it gets passed by Parliament (it should), this is great news. (Mind you, even if R18+ games start appearing on shelves here, I'll still buy them from overseas anyway since it is much cheaper!)
Troll, really? My profanity mirrored the use in the GP post. Birth control is a prescription drug like any other. Access to prescription drugs is included under the umbrella of access to healthcare, which is indeed, a human right (according to most human rights documents worldwide, both national and international).
Thus, birth control is a right. You may not agree, but that doesn't make my line of argument a troll.
It's already 16 or 24 or more cents in many places. Power in the US is cheap compared to many other countries. I pay about 16 US cents/kWh here actually (in Australia).
Minidisc was very popular when I was younger. Most people when I was in high school had MD players rather than walkmans (portable CD players existed, but this was before burning your own discs became practical for a home user, so people liked the ability to record onto MD). I had an MD player for many years and loved it.
I think it's only in the US that Minidisc never really took off. Most other places, it filled a gap in that 5 or so years after the death of the cassette and the beginning of affordable home CD burners.
98% piracy on PC? That can't possibly be even close to right. The popularity of Steam alone would attest to that (and far more people still buy boxed games than buy off Steam, given that Steam isn't available in all regions and currencies etc.)
Technically the Skyward Sword patch patches the ~save game data~ of affected games, not the game software itself. It's basically just a normal Wii channel that scans for affected files and fixes them. A good thing to be sure, but not really comparable to the patching of the game software itself.
Heh I'm very familiar with Appleton actually... I spend several months a year in the Fox Cities. I suppose I should have qualified my post with "LTE is not available ~on GSM networks~ in many areas yet". The US CDMA carriers (i.e. Verizon, Sprint) are ahead of the game when it comes to LTE deployment. And I keep forgetting the iPhone comes in a CDMA variant now in the US (doh!)
However, I'm not American and thus when I'm in the States I'm roaming using my unlocked (GSM) phone (or using a local AT&T SIM). So I kinda forgot about those "other" non-GSM carriers, since they may as well not exist for me, and it's only in the US that a CDMA iPhone exists. Nonetheless I still think you'll see LTE in both variants of the iPhone next version.
Well yeah, another factor is that not all 3G is created equal. Here in Australia, Telstra has HSPA+ networks that you can easily pull 20 Mbps+ off, real world speed. So the impetus for 4G is less than, say, you were stuck with a 3G network that only managed a few Mbps (which is quite common).
4G (well, LTE which really is still a 3G technology that American marketing droids have decided to wrongly call 4G) isn't yet available in very many places at all, globally speaking. Even in the US it's only in the large cities, and remember that Apple sells far more iPhones outside the US than in it. Plus given that the iPhone 4S supports HSPA+, that allows speeds that are more than fast enough for a mobile device already, regardless of all this 3G/4G/infinityG OMG terminology. (Remembering also that LTE comes with a tradeoff: rather crap battery life compared to HSDPA/HSPA/HSPA+)
Once you see 4G rolling out to more than a handful of places I'm sure it will be in the iPhone. In fact it will probably be in the next iteration due for release in the next 6 months.
When my American wife moved here to Australia for the first time she thought it was so weird that we didn't bleep out words on TV and radio anywhere near as much in the US. Even the worst words are usually allowed through here. Oh and full frontal nudity on free to air TV here was a bit of a shock for her too (this only occurs after a certain hour at night though... 10pm or something like that).
And when I'm in the US I often get a laugh out of the most mundane words being bleeped or removed from things. Like 'crap'. Or even things like 'hell' and 'gun'... they aren't even swear words!
OTOH a violent movie is likely to receive a higher rating in Australia than in the US, true.
Yeah true. If a country really wanted someone I doubt they'd give a crap whether they'd cleared immigration or not.
I suppose I was just venting since those stupid US rules are painful and make travel from where I live to quite a few countries impossible to do without giving ten fingerprints and all my personal information to the US Govt. *grumble*
Yeah for video iTunes sucks. Audio is good - it's DRM-free and of a decent quality (256 kbps AAC).
To be fair it's not really their fault - the studios won't LET them remove the DRM from the video content. They could get away with it in audio since iTunes dominated the market so much they could twist the studios' arms. But they don't enjoy that same near-monopoly in video, so the DRM remains.
Well, to be fair, the stuff you read about Australia on here is often exaggerated, missing crucial pieces of information that add context or background, or are just plain wrong. Not to say they are completely made up - no, they do relate to things that are actually happening. But they are reported on in a particular way that makes things sound worse than they are (usually).
To take one of your examples: speed cameras. What makes Australia unique in this regard? Virtually every developed country has speed cameras. I've travelled extensively and I don't think there are any more or less on average than other places. Certainly less than in the UK and much of Europe. Probably more fixed speed cameras than in the US (though, on the flip side, you do see a lot more cops parked in the median trying to catch speeders 'manually' in the US than in Australia). You'd have to be kinda dumb to get caught by a fixed speed camera in Australia anyway as in most states they are marked with multiple giant signs saying "speed camera ahead!" (Victoria is a notable exception to this). Irritating if you get caught? Yes... but hardly something that warrants discussion of shooting people...
Same with this article. They can discuss things behind closed doors all they want, but eventually if they want to actually DO something it will have to come out in the open and be passed through Parliament like any other law. Until that happens (or looks likely to happen), no point in overreacting. Think back to the internet filter stuff a year or two ago - it never actually happened because there was widespread opposition to it. But Slashdot didn't really mention that. It phrased articles about the filter proposal to make it sound like it was a done deal, when really, it never had any serious chance of getting through Parliament in its current state. But the damage to our 'reputation' is already done. I commonly see people on here still making the assumption that Australia has a net filter (when it doesn't and isn't likely to for the foreseeable future since the first one was never even introduced into Parliament, let alone passed).
I suppose what I'm saying is that Australians aren't really any different than Americans in this regard. Only some are politically interested in the first place. A smaller proportion of those still care about IT/media/communications issues enough to raise a fuss. And when things start to look bad enough, people do react - the defeat of the net filter is evidence of that. So at this point some closed-door discussions are taking place about piracy, sure, but until something concrete is revealed, there's no point in overreacting. As someone that works with Australian Government departments every day of the week as a contractor, I can tell you that 90% of discussion, proposals, ideas etc. never get off the ground.
The other factor is that life here is very good. We're a forgotten little corner of the world in some ways, so the world doesn't think about us much. But the economy is booming, the financial crisis that crippled so many others barely touched us (we were the only OECD nation that didn't go into recession), we have very low sovereign debt, a pretty good universal health care system, very low violent crime, unemployment is low, we have generous working conditions, guaranteed 4 weeks vacation + 10 public holidays, a $16 USD/hr minimum wage etc. and a culture that values work-life balance. People simply don't have much to complain about. Things like speed cameras and anti-piracy discussions simply don't rank that high on the care factor for most people. (And frankly, big media's product these days mostly sucks - they will kill themselves with their antiquated business practices before they die due to piracy anyway)
So do pay us a visit, you might be surprised to find that things aren't as bad as what you think (remember: things on Slashdot and the wider internet generally are designed to attract eyeballs and hits, so are phrased in the most provocative way)
The US is the WORST example to use here, as unlike virtually all other nations (Western or otherwise), America has no concept of 'transit'. You physically have to clear US immigration and customs if your flight passes through the US, just as if that was your final destination, even if you are only there for a 90 minute refuelling stop/plane change. It's ridiculous.
Problem is, most direct flights from Saudi Arabia are to other Muslim countries (for the simple reason that that's where most trade, business and family ties will be for people wanting to travel to/from SA). This guy was detained while transiting through Malaysia to another destination. Might be quite hard to find direct flights from Saudi Arabia to places like the Netherlands that don't pass through 'hostile' territory on the way.
Seriously though, good response. Nuclear isn't perfect (no energy source is and all come with risks), but it's the best option right now for baseline power load with zero greenhouse emissions. Supplement with wind and solar (in fact, even replace completely with wind and solar if the technology advances to the point at which it's practical to do so, but that time is not yet).
I'm 'paperless' with all my banks (four banks in two different countries) and they all allow me simply to log into the website and print off a statement that looks exactly like the ones they mail you. In fact, if you want, they'll send you a PDF of your statement every quarter by email (again, an identical document to the one they previously mailed). Print it out and voila, there's your 'traditional printed statement'.
Not that I've every actually had to do it, but it's nice to know I can...
While it hasn't got anything to do with tax, Australia's immigration policies are based on such a concept.
There's a list of 'needed' careers, or careers in demand that gets updated from time to time by the relevant government agencies (relying on figures from the Bureau of Statistics and Department of Employment and Workplace Relations). If you have qualifications in a needed field, you'll find the immigration requirements significantly relaxed compared to others. Here's the current list of 'desired' occupations: http://www.immi.gov.au/skilled/_pdf/sol-schedule1.pdf
Point is, it'd quite possible to apply a similar thing to a tax system and provided it's run by a good government employing proper transparency and anti-corruption safeguards (which in any civilised country should already be in place), it shouldn't pose a problem.
Agreed. The US has a culture of philanthropy far, far larger than exists anywhere else (including other Western, English-speaking countries). It's immediately obvious if you spend any decent amount of time in the US (particularly in medical, artistic etc. fields) how much reliance is placed public donations, both large and small, compared to other countries.
I think that's right. Philanthropy of the scale and type referred to in the summary is really quite an American thing (I wouldn't even extend that to the rest of the English-speaking world to be honest).
One nice thing people around here (Australia) will generally say about Americans, despite the fact that poking fun at Americans is somewhat a (light hearted) national pasttime here, is that they are generous. They generally mean this on a personal level, but having lived in the US for quite a while myself, I can definitely say that there is a culture of philanthropy there that goes way beyond what it does in other developed countries. That partly stems from the greater income disparity in the US I think (there's a lot more very poor people in the US as a proportion of the population compared to other OECD countries, but on the flipside, there's more super-wealthy as well, who are willing and able to donate sums large enough to make a difference).
Also I see philanthropy as "filling the gap" left by the pack of public services and funding that we take for granted in other countries. To use a basic example, compare the BBC in the UK/the ABC in Australia/CBC in Canada with PBS in the US... the former three are very good quality but funded completely by government, the latter relies on public donations - the continual "please support us" and "this show was made possible by" ads on PBS were definitely a very noticeable and unusual thing to me the first time I saw it. Similarly, every time I visit a gallery or exhibition in the US, I notice that the corporate and individual sponsors are made very obvious (either printed in a guide book, or on a plaque on the wall etc.) I also note that most buildings named after a person are named for the person who gave money to fund that building's development, whereas in Australia it's more usual that buildings are simply named after someone influential in the relevant field (even if it was funded by private individuals).
I'm not saying that philanthropy is an ~exclusively~ American thing, but the culture of giving large amounts to institutions seems to be an order of magnitude greater in the US than in other similar countries.
Got no heating in my apartment so we use plug-in space heaters in winter. My bill for the three months of summer is around $120. My bill for the three months of winter is almost $700. I hate those things. So expensive to run, but I suppose I dislike being freezing all the time more...
Well we obviously get some US tourists but, with the exchange rate and the fact that the Americans get no annual leave (relatively speaking compared to all other OECD countries), a far off destination like Australia isn't high on their list. If you ask them, most would love to visit Australia, but they just can't do it with their paltry 1-2 weeks of leave (considering you basically lose 3-4 days of that due to the length of the flights and the time difference).
The decline in US tourists in Australia in the last 10 years has more than been compensated for by an increase in tourism from Asia and some European countries (GFC impacts notwithstanding).
Slashdot Mirror
True, but it should be understood that it was not actually ~illegal~ to own or play a 'refused classification' game previously in Australia in most States (WA being the notable exception). It was merely illegal for a store to SELL the game. Or more accurately, the law says that all media sold to the public in Australia must have a classification, so obviously if something doesn't have one/is refused classification, they can't sell it. And due to some stupidness arising from the early 90s when the classification scheme for computer games was first developed, the ratings only topped out at MA15+ (whereas they go up to R or X for other media). After all, only kids play these new-fangled computer game things right?
I live in Australia, but own and play, perfectly legally, several games that are were refused classification in Australia. I bought these in person while travelling overseas in the past, or ordered them from an overseas website. And in my jurisdiction at least (the ACT) I'm not doing anything wrong. The only thing I couldn't do is set up a retail company and sell them.
Getting a proper R18+ rating for games is the culmination of a pretty long fight by gamers and retailers. Assuming it gets passed by Parliament (it should), this is great news. (Mind you, even if R18+ games start appearing on shelves here, I'll still buy them from overseas anyway since it is much cheaper!)
Troll, really? My profanity mirrored the use in the GP post. Birth control is a prescription drug like any other. Access to prescription drugs is included under the umbrella of access to healthcare, which is indeed, a human right (according to most human rights documents worldwide, both national and international).
Thus, birth control is a right. You may not agree, but that doesn't make my line of argument a troll.
It's already 16 or 24 or more cents in many places. Power in the US is cheap compared to many other countries. I pay about 16 US cents/kWh here actually (in Australia).
Minidisc was very popular when I was younger. Most people when I was in high school had MD players rather than walkmans (portable CD players existed, but this was before burning your own discs became practical for a home user, so people liked the ability to record onto MD). I had an MD player for many years and loved it.
I think it's only in the US that Minidisc never really took off. Most other places, it filled a gap in that 5 or so years after the death of the cassette and the beginning of affordable home CD burners.
No, at worst, you might get electrocuted ;)
98% piracy on PC? That can't possibly be even close to right. The popularity of Steam alone would attest to that (and far more people still buy boxed games than buy off Steam, given that Steam isn't available in all regions and currencies etc.)
Technically the Skyward Sword patch patches the ~save game data~ of affected games, not the game software itself. It's basically just a normal Wii channel that scans for affected files and fixes them. A good thing to be sure, but not really comparable to the patching of the game software itself.
Heh I'm very familiar with Appleton actually ... I spend several months a year in the Fox Cities. I suppose I should have qualified my post with "LTE is not available ~on GSM networks~ in many areas yet". The US CDMA carriers (i.e. Verizon, Sprint) are ahead of the game when it comes to LTE deployment. And I keep forgetting the iPhone comes in a CDMA variant now in the US (doh!)
However, I'm not American and thus when I'm in the States I'm roaming using my unlocked (GSM) phone (or using a local AT&T SIM). So I kinda forgot about those "other" non-GSM carriers, since they may as well not exist for me, and it's only in the US that a CDMA iPhone exists. Nonetheless I still think you'll see LTE in both variants of the iPhone next version.
Well yeah, another factor is that not all 3G is created equal. Here in Australia, Telstra has HSPA+ networks that you can easily pull 20 Mbps+ off, real world speed. So the impetus for 4G is less than, say, you were stuck with a 3G network that only managed a few Mbps (which is quite common).
4G (well, LTE which really is still a 3G technology that American marketing droids have decided to wrongly call 4G) isn't yet available in very many places at all, globally speaking. Even in the US it's only in the large cities, and remember that Apple sells far more iPhones outside the US than in it. Plus given that the iPhone 4S supports HSPA+, that allows speeds that are more than fast enough for a mobile device already, regardless of all this 3G/4G/infinityG OMG terminology. (Remembering also that LTE comes with a tradeoff: rather crap battery life compared to HSDPA/HSPA/HSPA+)
Once you see 4G rolling out to more than a handful of places I'm sure it will be in the iPhone. In fact it will probably be in the next iteration due for release in the next 6 months.
Birth control is part of a health care scheme in any civilised country. And health care is a fucking right.
And swearing. Don't forget the swearing.
When my American wife moved here to Australia for the first time she thought it was so weird that we didn't bleep out words on TV and radio anywhere near as much in the US. Even the worst words are usually allowed through here. Oh and full frontal nudity on free to air TV here was a bit of a shock for her too (this only occurs after a certain hour at night though ... 10pm or something like that).
And when I'm in the US I often get a laugh out of the most mundane words being bleeped or removed from things. Like 'crap'. Or even things like 'hell' and 'gun' ... they aren't even swear words!
OTOH a violent movie is likely to receive a higher rating in Australia than in the US, true.
Yeah true. If a country really wanted someone I doubt they'd give a crap whether they'd cleared immigration or not.
I suppose I was just venting since those stupid US rules are painful and make travel from where I live to quite a few countries impossible to do without giving ten fingerprints and all my personal information to the US Govt. *grumble*
Yeah for video iTunes sucks. Audio is good - it's DRM-free and of a decent quality (256 kbps AAC).
To be fair it's not really their fault - the studios won't LET them remove the DRM from the video content. They could get away with it in audio since iTunes dominated the market so much they could twist the studios' arms. But they don't enjoy that same near-monopoly in video, so the DRM remains.
Well, to be fair, the stuff you read about Australia on here is often exaggerated, missing crucial pieces of information that add context or background, or are just plain wrong. Not to say they are completely made up - no, they do relate to things that are actually happening. But they are reported on in a particular way that makes things sound worse than they are (usually).
To take one of your examples: speed cameras. What makes Australia unique in this regard? Virtually every developed country has speed cameras. I've travelled extensively and I don't think there are any more or less on average than other places. Certainly less than in the UK and much of Europe. Probably more fixed speed cameras than in the US (though, on the flip side, you do see a lot more cops parked in the median trying to catch speeders 'manually' in the US than in Australia). You'd have to be kinda dumb to get caught by a fixed speed camera in Australia anyway as in most states they are marked with multiple giant signs saying "speed camera ahead!" (Victoria is a notable exception to this). Irritating if you get caught? Yes ... but hardly something that warrants discussion of shooting people...
Same with this article. They can discuss things behind closed doors all they want, but eventually if they want to actually DO something it will have to come out in the open and be passed through Parliament like any other law. Until that happens (or looks likely to happen), no point in overreacting. Think back to the internet filter stuff a year or two ago - it never actually happened because there was widespread opposition to it. But Slashdot didn't really mention that. It phrased articles about the filter proposal to make it sound like it was a done deal, when really, it never had any serious chance of getting through Parliament in its current state. But the damage to our 'reputation' is already done. I commonly see people on here still making the assumption that Australia has a net filter (when it doesn't and isn't likely to for the foreseeable future since the first one was never even introduced into Parliament, let alone passed).
I suppose what I'm saying is that Australians aren't really any different than Americans in this regard. Only some are politically interested in the first place. A smaller proportion of those still care about IT/media/communications issues enough to raise a fuss. And when things start to look bad enough, people do react - the defeat of the net filter is evidence of that. So at this point some closed-door discussions are taking place about piracy, sure, but until something concrete is revealed, there's no point in overreacting. As someone that works with Australian Government departments every day of the week as a contractor, I can tell you that 90% of discussion, proposals, ideas etc. never get off the ground.
The other factor is that life here is very good. We're a forgotten little corner of the world in some ways, so the world doesn't think about us much. But the economy is booming, the financial crisis that crippled so many others barely touched us (we were the only OECD nation that didn't go into recession), we have very low sovereign debt, a pretty good universal health care system, very low violent crime, unemployment is low, we have generous working conditions, guaranteed 4 weeks vacation + 10 public holidays, a $16 USD/hr minimum wage etc. and a culture that values work-life balance. People simply don't have much to complain about. Things like speed cameras and anti-piracy discussions simply don't rank that high on the care factor for most people. (And frankly, big media's product these days mostly sucks - they will kill themselves with their antiquated business practices before they die due to piracy anyway)
So do pay us a visit, you might be surprised to find that things aren't as bad as what you think (remember: things on Slashdot and the wider internet generally are designed to attract eyeballs and hits, so are phrased in the most provocative way)
Lol what?
The US is the WORST example to use here, as unlike virtually all other nations (Western or otherwise), America has no concept of 'transit'. You physically have to clear US immigration and customs if your flight passes through the US, just as if that was your final destination, even if you are only there for a 90 minute refuelling stop/plane change. It's ridiculous.
Problem is, most direct flights from Saudi Arabia are to other Muslim countries (for the simple reason that that's where most trade, business and family ties will be for people wanting to travel to/from SA). This guy was detained while transiting through Malaysia to another destination. Might be quite hard to find direct flights from Saudi Arabia to places like the Netherlands that don't pass through 'hostile' territory on the way.
+100, Take that!
Seriously though, good response. Nuclear isn't perfect (no energy source is and all come with risks), but it's the best option right now for baseline power load with zero greenhouse emissions. Supplement with wind and solar (in fact, even replace completely with wind and solar if the technology advances to the point at which it's practical to do so, but that time is not yet).
Wow, that sucks. :(
I'm 'paperless' with all my banks (four banks in two different countries) and they all allow me simply to log into the website and print off a statement that looks exactly like the ones they mail you. In fact, if you want, they'll send you a PDF of your statement every quarter by email (again, an identical document to the one they previously mailed). Print it out and voila, there's your 'traditional printed statement'.
Not that I've every actually had to do it, but it's nice to know I can...
While it hasn't got anything to do with tax, Australia's immigration policies are based on such a concept.
There's a list of 'needed' careers, or careers in demand that gets updated from time to time by the relevant government agencies (relying on figures from the Bureau of Statistics and Department of Employment and Workplace Relations). If you have qualifications in a needed field, you'll find the immigration requirements significantly relaxed compared to others. Here's the current list of 'desired' occupations: http://www.immi.gov.au/skilled/_pdf/sol-schedule1.pdf
Point is, it'd quite possible to apply a similar thing to a tax system and provided it's run by a good government employing proper transparency and anti-corruption safeguards (which in any civilised country should already be in place), it shouldn't pose a problem.
Agreed. The US has a culture of philanthropy far, far larger than exists anywhere else (including other Western, English-speaking countries). It's immediately obvious if you spend any decent amount of time in the US (particularly in medical, artistic etc. fields) how much reliance is placed public donations, both large and small, compared to other countries.
I think that's right. Philanthropy of the scale and type referred to in the summary is really quite an American thing (I wouldn't even extend that to the rest of the English-speaking world to be honest).
One nice thing people around here (Australia) will generally say about Americans, despite the fact that poking fun at Americans is somewhat a (light hearted) national pasttime here, is that they are generous. They generally mean this on a personal level, but having lived in the US for quite a while myself, I can definitely say that there is a culture of philanthropy there that goes way beyond what it does in other developed countries. That partly stems from the greater income disparity in the US I think (there's a lot more very poor people in the US as a proportion of the population compared to other OECD countries, but on the flipside, there's more super-wealthy as well, who are willing and able to donate sums large enough to make a difference).
Also I see philanthropy as "filling the gap" left by the pack of public services and funding that we take for granted in other countries. To use a basic example, compare the BBC in the UK/the ABC in Australia/CBC in Canada with PBS in the US ... the former three are very good quality but funded completely by government, the latter relies on public donations - the continual "please support us" and "this show was made possible by" ads on PBS were definitely a very noticeable and unusual thing to me the first time I saw it. Similarly, every time I visit a gallery or exhibition in the US, I notice that the corporate and individual sponsors are made very obvious (either printed in a guide book, or on a plaque on the wall etc.) I also note that most buildings named after a person are named for the person who gave money to fund that building's development, whereas in Australia it's more usual that buildings are simply named after someone influential in the relevant field (even if it was funded by private individuals).
I'm not saying that philanthropy is an ~exclusively~ American thing, but the culture of giving large amounts to institutions seems to be an order of magnitude greater in the US than in other similar countries.
A buttload, I imagine.
Got no heating in my apartment so we use plug-in space heaters in winter. My bill for the three months of summer is around $120. My bill for the three months of winter is almost $700. I hate those things. So expensive to run, but I suppose I dislike being freezing all the time more...
Oh man, some of the reviews for that cable are awesome :D
Well we obviously get some US tourists but, with the exchange rate and the fact that the Americans get no annual leave (relatively speaking compared to all other OECD countries), a far off destination like Australia isn't high on their list. If you ask them, most would love to visit Australia, but they just can't do it with their paltry 1-2 weeks of leave (considering you basically lose 3-4 days of that due to the length of the flights and the time difference).
The decline in US tourists in Australia in the last 10 years has more than been compensated for by an increase in tourism from Asia and some European countries (GFC impacts notwithstanding).